By Erica C. Barnett
Members of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s governing board, including Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Council homelessness committee chair Andrew Lewis, expressed concerns over the scale and scope of the agency’s draft Five-Year Plan to address homelessness, which calls for 18,000 new shelter beds and parking spots for people living in their vehicles—and an annual price tag in the billions. Currently, the city of Seattle and King County are the authority’s only funders.
We dug into the details of the draft plan on Tuesday.
Harrell, who declined to fund any of the KCRHA’s requests for new programs in last year’s city budget, said he didn’t “see a route to achieve” the full five-year plan, which includes $8.4 billion in capital costs and between $1.7 and $3.4 billion in annual operations and maintenance costs. “That’s almost another city [budget],” he said. Instead, Harrell said, the authority should figure out what it can do with incremental increases of 5 or 10 percent a year and come back with a plan that focuses on responding to the immediate need for emergency shelter. “Maybe it’s there and maybe I’m just not seeing it, but I just want a little more meat there.”
In response to concerns from elected officials, KCRHA CEO Marc Dones the reason the plan zeroes out tiny houses is that “the modeling calls for fewer modular shelters than we currently have—it’s just math.”
Lewis echoed Harrell’s comments, saying he’d like to see a “price tag that is more within existing norms that can be nimble, responsive, and bring the kind of response we’re hearing from the public that they want to see … like hotel/motel acquisition, tiny homes, and pallet shelters that can be scaled with urgency and scaled more achievably within existing resources to mitigate those most significant encampments that are rightly causing significant community consternation.”
While the city declined to fund the KCRHA’s budget requests last year, they did pay for new emergency shelters and tiny houses, a type of shelter Dones has singled out for criticism for years. The agency’s five-year plan includes additional funding for every existing shelter type except tiny house villages, which are featured in a chart showing “$0” across the board.
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In response to questions from Seattle Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who noted that the five-year plan actually shows a 55-bed reduction in tiny house village spots, Dones said the reason the plan zeroes out tiny houses is that “the modeling calls for fewer modular shelters than we currently have—it’s just math.” As we reported last week, the KCRHA determined how much of each type of shelter the region needs based largely on interviews with 180 people experiencing homelessness about their needs; they did not ask any questions about specific shelter types. Dones said even though the plan shows an overall reduction in tiny houses, “we would not look to pull funding out of the existing THV stock or what has been funded in order to make the numbers and the math” match up with actual shelters on the ground.
The governing board isn’t scheduled to meet again until April, when they’re supposed to vote to approve the five-year plan. King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci and Herbold both questioned this timeline, saying they’d like an opportunity to review the final version and discuss it again publicly before voting to approve it. The authority is up against an 18-month deadline to approve the plan, which was originally supposed to be out last fall. The board— whose job is to sign off on the plan as approved by a separate implementation board, not to amend it—agreed to tentatively add one additional meeting in May to take a final vote on the plan.
$8.4 billion in capital costs for 18,000 units of housing? That’s roughly $466,000 per unit!!! Dones must be smoking the same stuff as those homeless people.
The biggest problem with Lefties is often they don’t understand math very well… the rhetoric never catches up with the numbers.
Building any housing in Greater Seattle costs over 300k per unit. That unit has to rent to for something like $2300 per month to pay for itself. And these are bare minimum numbers. Projects on Capital Hill or the U-District would be much higher.
How public housing works is by throwing millions (maybe billions?) in cash at the front end. If you have 300k per unit in cash, well the rent doesn’t have to be $2300 to cover expenses. All public housing providers constantly try to raise on front end cash for affordable housing. In the Seattle market right now…. a 1 billion dollar investment would cook down into maybe 3,000 units of affordable housing? So if Washington State did bond 4 billion for housing and gave half of that to Greater Seattle…. that’s 6,000 units….. maybe, without the bullshit corruption that pushes up the prices of public housing projects on the West Coast.
So are Dones numbers right? Maybe. Add skilled nursing and residential care of the hardcore addicts and mentally ill on the street and yes, it’s likely the numbers aren’t all that far off. There’s no chance of King County ever spending that sort of money, so what does it matter?
“Add skilled nursing and residential care of the hardcore addicts and mentally ill on the street and yes, it’s likely the numbers aren’t all that far off.”
You know that such things aren’t necessary because there is no mass of addicts or mentally ill on our streets. You just want to hear yourself talk at this point.
Time for Dones to go. He’s shown that what he wants is enormous money to dole out to cronies, which was always the case. We have wasted too much $$ already. No more. Only thing good here is zeroing out the stupid villages. They are crime magnets and don’t appear to contribute to getting their residents into permanent housing, so their purpose is not being met and their budgets shouldn’t be, either.
‘Dones said the reason the plan zeroes out tiny houses is that “the modeling calls for fewer modular shelters than we currently have—it’s just math.”’ His comment means nothing; whatever modeling he’s referring to doesn’t automatically become “math.” It seems that the RHA 5-year Plan is founded upon less than 200 responses from unhoused people and Dones’ opinion of tiny houses. This is truly a shame, because after three resounding failures in the last almost-20 years of organizations instituted to end homelessness (or at least reduce it), many of us had some hope that the RHA would be different. Granted it is not funded at the level that could make a real difference, but for all the talented staff added in the last year, it also is gravely deficient in administrative and communication skills.
When your founders no longer support you, either resign or be fired
Naw, local leaders like Harrel find Dones and the KCRHA useful…. it’s not Harrell’s fault the homeless response isn’t working! Blame Dones! It’s the KCRHA has failed!
Dones is a world class idiot. Doesn’t even seem to feel the bus wheels rolling over them. Dones submitted a 12 billion dollar budget and a 5 year plan that’s never going to be funded… So just %$&^*(# quit already! But Dones is staying on…. ready to be the punching bag elected officials need.
Dones’ comment makes no sense at all and shows his lack of knowledge of modeling and math. It’s time local leaders start calling them up.
Tiny Homes may not be a “forever” solution but it IS a transition to a place that is safe, warm and dry within a community.
We need more Tiny Homes, not fewer.
But tiny houses are a “forever” solution. Harrell’s done the math. Having people live in garden sheds like the ones sold at Home Depot is so much cheaper than building real housing….and no matter how much the City Government promises to build something better… why would they? All the City needs to get the trash off the streets and into some sort of semi-organized camp out of the public eye. The history of Seattle is filled with laborers, drunks, druggies, Asians and anybody else without money for better accommodations living in shotgun shacks. It’s the way it is. Progressive City my ass…. it’s a big talk, I see zero political will to pay for anything different.
Racism? That’s a new one coming from you. 1886 called. They want their anti-Asian rhetoric back.